'The Nakba Isn't Just History, It's About People Feeling Homeless Nakba commemorations are coming to an end. This month has been a real eye-opener for me, raised my consciousness. I want to talk about Nakba here in strictly emotional terms.One of the signal moments for me came when Nadia Hijab, a highly successful Palestinian-American, born in Syria to refugees, said in Brooklyn, ?I feel I belong nowhere.? This member of the Council on Foreign Relations belongs nowhere! ?When I go toPalestine, I feel I belong there.? The right of return, said this softspoken intellectual, was an individual right. Did you or did you not want to go home? And now in midlife, she finds that she wants to be back in Palestine. I?m thinking about her feelings in universal human terms. What makes us feel at home? Zionism was born of Jewish feelings of homelessness in Europe. It was given political muscle by all the Eastern European Jews displaced and living in the U.S., who did not feel at home here. My grandparents who came over at the turn of the century after the pogroms didn't trust gentile Americans, felt like outsiders. Then after World War II, more homelessness: with all the displaced persons in Europe, many of whom ended up in Palestine, but also in the sense in this country among American Jews that the U.S. had allowed the Holocaust to take place. That was a part of my Jewish identification as an outsider (And it is the central idea of a paper on the Myth of Abandonment by Michael Desch that I am about to revisit, it is so important). Those alienated and abandoned feelings are what generated the state of Israel, and in turn the Israel lobby?we aren?t at home here, aren?t safe. We must take measures. It is of course staggering that people as wealthy and privileged as American Jews can feel outside, but many
obviously do.
The Nakba is of course about Arab homelessness. The tragedy of the state of Israel is that it expelled so many Arabs who had a traditional way of life utterly tied to the land of Palestine and those feelings have gone so long unhealed and now 60 years on they darken Israel?s future. The cover of the Nakba issue of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is a haunting image of a Palestinian shepherd, covered with wool. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that very soon after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Germans acknowledged war crimes and before too long reparations began. The refugees of Europe had of course lost families and homes, but emotionally they were given refuge: granted their sense of grievance. That recognition has never happened with the Nakba. For 60 years, the insult has outweighed the injury. Of course there is a growing movement to recognize the Nakba, but Israel and American Jewish leadership have only deployed its guns against it, and in all the endless political dickering over the Right of Return, whether it can be extinguished with money or not, the central fact, We took your homes from you and forced you out?that has never been acknowledged. (I remember how shocked I was years ago when the publisher of a paper I worked at, who had worked at AIPAC, told me with a guilty smile that Israel had taken their homes away. I had no idea.) What if Israel acknowledged that horror tomorrow? It would go a long way right there to some resolution. One of the Nakba books I read this month was Resistance, Exile and Return, an oral history by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian scholar who died in 2001.'
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